3 October 2006

Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer and executives from Arch Minerals, BMC and DKRW Advanced Fuels announced an initial agreement to construct a coal-to-liquids plant in Montana. The facility will be located on the site of the Bull Mountain Coal (BMC) mine outside of Roundup, MT.

The plant will gasify coal, converting a portion of the resulting syngas to 22,000 barrels per day of Fischer Tropsch diesel, with the rest going to generate 300 MW of power using IGCC (Integrated Gas Combined Cycle) technology.

The plant will be outfitted with carbon capture technology. Project plans are to sequester the carbon dioxide in certain Montana oil fields. Furthermore, the gasifier at the facility will remove virtually all mercury, sulfur and particulate matter from the coal.

Arch Minerals, BMC and DKRW Advanced Fuels are the equity partners in the project, and are the lead on the Medicine Bow CTL project in Wyoming. DKRW will use GE’s coal gasification technology and Rentech’s Fischer-Tropsch technology in both the Medicine Bow and Bull Mountain plants. (Earlier post.)

If the factory takes oxygen, burns coal with it, turns it into CO2 and puts it under the ground, won't that cause an oxygen shortage? If you left the C02 in the atmosphere the trees would breath it and turn it back into oxygen.

Jimmy Dean,
While sequestering CO2 does take some of the, O2 (in CO2) out of the atmosphere, the amounts are relatively small. Even if we were to burn all the carbon based fuel on the planet (fossil fuel and green plants) the effect would only be felt at high altitudes, and by jets.

If the factory takes oxygen, burns coal with it, turns it into CO2 and puts it under the ground, won't that cause an oxygen shortage?

Obviously not. We run out of coal long before we use any significant amount of oxygen. It's a serious challenge to even measure the change in the global atmosphere's O2 concentration.

If you left the CO2 in the atmosphere the trees would breath it and turn it back into oxygen.

Only if you cut down the trees and buried the wood so it wouldn't rot or be burned. In steady state, a forest produces zero net oxygen (actually, a very small amount, from organic matter that survives to be buried in natural sediments, but this is a very small rate.)

Sequestered is commonly spoken by CTL folks as a green word and usually has little creedence in application.
Montana is one of the most seismically active US states. Since 1925, the State has experienced five shocks that reached intensity VIII or greater (Modified Mercalli Scale).

Hey that is what they teach in public schools, that trees create oxygen.

Reminds me of a sign on a lawn I saw at Cornell a few decades ago, saying something like 'this lawn produces [a specified amount] of oxygen each year'. What they forgot to mention was that all that oxygen was then consumed when the grass clippings and dead roots rotted or were eaten, and that even more O2 was consumed by the mowers used to maintain the lawn.